It began as an organized withdrawal, but it quickly turned into a retreat, the Tahni High Guard pulling back down the hill, seeking cover wherever they could, behind rows of cracked and crumbling buildings, lots packed with construction equipment, even behind the burning wreckage of their own aircraft. It was easy, down here, to forget the war up there, but it was still going on, the sonic booms nearly constant overhead, the night banished in the glowing aftereffects of the destruction of our aerospacecraft and theirs, of warheads detonating either at their targets or prematurely, brought down by ECM jamming or counter-missile fire.
“Strike Cover,” I called, just a prayer into the night wind, “this is Strike Delta Three-Zero, need air support. Do you read? Over.” I even used proper comms procedure, which we didn’t bother with much suit-to-suit, because the Fleet types were sticklers for it.
Nothing.
Yeah, I didn’t think so. I could have tried to launch a commo drone to get a line-of-sight linkup with one of the assault shuttles, but the odds of it surviving more than a couple seconds once it climbed up a hundred meters were almost nil.
Plasma blasts chased the High Guard troops back to cover, and it looked as if Cano and Freddy wanted to pursue as well, caught up in the momentary victory and thinking they could run the enemy to ground if only I set them loose. But I couldn’t. I knew better.
“All Delta elements,” I said, the words seeming to come from somewhere outside my body, “pull back to the defensive lines now.”
“We got them, Cam!” Cano insisted. “They’re on the run!”
I shuffled to a halt, aware again of my motions and position, my conscious mind finally catching up with my instincts, and stood for just a moment, staring at Billy Cano.
“They’re on the run now,” I told him. “If we go running headlong after them, they’ll make a stand and we’ll be strung out and bent over. Now get back to the defensive lines until some other stupid bastard volunteers to take charge of this bunch of yahoos.”
“Right, okay,” Cano said, his tone going meek, as if he understood what he’d been about to do.
I didn’t fly the kilometer up to the earthwork, as tempting as it was to save time. The Tahni were out of sight from the ground, but there was no use tempting them with an airborne target. Sod crumbled under my steps, and I had the unreasoning fear the whole side of the hill might collapse under the weight of us. It was nonsense, the whole thing was built up around the walls of the fusion plant, the dirt anchored by age until it would have taken earth movers to rip it out, but it was the sort of fear that took hold when I let my mind wander away from the mission, the abject terror that I’d missed something, that something would go wrong and kill us all and it would be my fault.
I topped the hill and found myself staring into the yawning muzzles of half a dozen coil guns for just a moment before the Boomers shifted their aim. The raised wall of dirt had been crystalized to glass by the heat of the electron beamers, and the brittle surface crunched under my feet, the slivers sharp enough to slice through flesh, and I was grateful mine was shielded by the armor.
“I’m Lt. Alvarez, Third Platoon, Delta,” I announced to no one in particular, lacking the time and the mental energy to read through all the IFF transponders scattered across nearly a kilometer along the earthen step. “Who’s in command?”
I was hoping like hell it was the Skipper, because I was just so ready to not be running Delta, but even more I was also just wishing it was someone superior to me in rank, because I was not even going to try to command what amounted, in sheer numbers, to a light battalion. I should have remembered that old saying about being careful what you wish for.
“I am, Alvarez,” Captain Cronje said, and if he didn’t snarl the words, it might have been because he was too damned relieved at having the siege on his position lifted. “Not surprised to see you scurrying out of the rubble. Cockroaches are born survivors.”
His IFF shone like a demonic halo as he shuffled across the crystalized dirt, cracking off shards that glittered by the light of the fires, the flashes of artificial lightning in the sky. I wanted to snap something very insubordinate at him, but one of us had to be a responsible adult and it wasn’t going to be this asshole.
“Did anyone from Delta Headquarters make it?” I asked, instead, maybe from sound tactical thinking, maybe from sentiment, or maybe just the desperate hope someone here was higher in rank than Cronje.
There was a pause, a hesitation that was harder to detect when the other person was inside a helmet and I was only hearing their voice instead of seeing their face, but I caught it just the same.
“Captain Covington and First Sergeant Campbell took Lieutenants Burke and Patel with them, along with the Delta Company Boomers.” His rasping sigh shouldn’t have made it past the static filters, but it did. Or maybe I just imagined it. “He left the rest of us here to hold off the Tahni High Guard while they went into the reactor complex to finish the mission. And that’s exactly what I intend to
